The Future of UK-China Relations: The Search for a New Model

By Kerry Brown

At a time when both China’s role in the world is becoming the focus of international business strategy and Brexit is pushing the UK to look to the rest of the world for trade and investment, Kerry Brown assesses the potential for a new “golden age” of UK–China relations.

For too long, Brown argues, China has been regarded with indifference by the UK, despite a well-established relationship stretching back some 200 years. Now, more than ever, Britain needs to actively engage with China and seek to understand China’s ambitions. This entails a radical change of mindset, vocabulary and attitude, as well as establishing a clear vision of what the UK wants from a resurgent global China, beyond trade and money.

Brown shows that our future relationship with China is deep with symbolic meaning and will have reverberations throughout the world, as either a sobering example of what a world run on Chinese values might look like, or as a model of how to successfully rebalance a sudden asymmetrical dependence on a newly powerful China. It is one, however, that requires the UK to question some of its own national myths and the story it tells about itself, as well as to learn about a new power with a very different history and set of values.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788212694

Kerry Brown

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He was previously Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Between 1998–2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, including three years as First Secretary at the British embassy in Beijing. His recent books include Contemporary China (2013), Hu Jintao: China’s Silent Ruler (2012) and Ballot Box China (2011).

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Introduction

It was one of those large public debating festivals held usually during the warm months in Britain. A packed schedule of events over two days, addressing issues from the US election to the impact of artificial intelligence – a smorgasbord of argumentation and intellectual manoeuvring by speakers and their audiences. Panels with invited experts on specific themes spoke for a few minutes each and then there were moderated question and answer sessions with the audience. I was glad to have been invited just as an academic attendee. Academics were at least spared the full onslaught of public indignation and rage because we were regarded as experts present to give balance. Polemicists, controversialists, politicians, and self-publicisers were not so lucky. But then, in an odd way, brutal treatment by their audiences seemed to be what they were there for. They had Nietzsche’s famous dictum engraved on their hearts: what didn’t kill them was going to make them stronger; they seemed to be there to survive and then get more powerful.

Academics are supposedly custodians of neutrality. That is our claim about ourselves at least. And these days, the title Professor usually gives some pause for thought and restraint on whomever you are facing publicly and grants a little bit of mercy. My session was about the impact of the rise of China. The argument I used was one that I had deployed at similar events throughout Europe and the rest of the world over the previous months and years: like it or not, China is going to be part of our global economic future and probably our geopolitical and social one. Even if we are not going to it, it is coming to us – through investment, finance, students and tourists. This is a moment of historic change. For the first time in modern history, a power with a profoundly different cultural background and a very different set of values (ones that I will spell out in more detail later) is about to take centre stage. We (and throughout this work, when I use the word we I am referring to constituencies in the UK) need to adjust our mindsets, revise our vocabularies, and reset our standard maps of the world. This is not an issue on which we can adopt discrete neutrality. Opposition to China or attempts to exclude it is futile. This wasn’t about its political model but about the fact that it was a country that encompassed a fifth of humanity. As far back as 1968, in an article in Foreign Affairs, the then US presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, wrote that the world had no moral or intellectual right to exclude this large segment of humanity from the global community. Later, as president, he famously proceeded to put this into action by effecting a rapprochement with the People’s Republic in 1972. That argument, in very different ways and in transformed circumstances, is no less true today. The main question now is just what sort of space and what kinds of shared future could we, whether British, Europeans or North Americans create with a country loaded with ambition and with the sense that its moment of just restoration, after a modern history full of challenges and suffering, was finally coming good.¹

The audience that came to the debates that day, as almost all audiences I have spoken to in the UK, was polite and thoughtful. They listened to news and analysis of the fundamental rearrangement of the power structures and realignment of geopolitical forces in the world they were living in with an almost preternatural calm. There was a lack of emotion or anything approaching concern or fear. Similar speeches, when I had been based in Sydney for three years from 2012, usually evinced much more visceral and urgently anxious reactions. But in the UK, it seemed the ethos of keep calm and carry on still ruled.

What was striking about this lack of emotional response was that this was clearly not due to the particular intrinsic qualities or dispositions of the people in the audience. On different subjects, they were more than willing to express deep, often divided feelings. A debate on the UK and the European Union in one of the neighbouring rooms nearly ended in a riot, with participants so deeply polarized they may as well have come from different planets. But the most fractious debate, one which I was only able to squeeze into the back of the room to listen to, was about recycling. Enraged speeches from the floor decried local council incompetence in refuse management. An elderly gentleman went puce red when describing the amount of time he needed to sort out rubbish into separate categories only to read in the Daily Mail that it had been dumped in the same landfill. One environmentalist on the panel was screamed at for saying Your children will blame you for not doing anything about this. What was staggering was that the debates were not about disagreements over scientific evidence for climate change – everyone at least seemed to accept there was a problem. The anger was more about some nebulous idea of a mendaciously incompetent state, which was doing its best to irritate people and then claim it was there to help when it was clearly consistently failing.

That experience seemed to me highly indicative of the attitude in the UK towards China, and how our future will be affected by the world that an increasingly influential People’s Republic will create around and for us. In essence, this book tries to address this one issue: why is there a lack of emotion, which almost (as I will argue later) verges on indifference, towards something which would seem to merit much more engagement? What should I make of that calm, almost ruminative air at those, and other meetings? Does it indicate an audience deeply confident about a matter everyone else is worried by? Or does it mean that the UK is so utterly indifferent and clueless that it doesn’t even see what is about to wash across it? Is the UK so preoccupied by its own issues that it simply doesn’t see the wider picture around it – something that cuts across the idea that post-Brexit the UK is about to embark on an era of global involvement and engagement.

That set of questions is one that haunts this book, because despite thinking about these issues for many years, I have to admit that, paradoxically, despite being British I have a clearer and better idea of what the Chinese think of us, than what my native country thinks of China. This has even manifested itself in my daily work. For many years, I have been asked, and been asking, what the Chinese want, and what they believe, about the UK. I have come to realize that the question of what the British want, and what they believe about China, almost never comes up. In dealing with China, as with so many other issues, the British are brilliant at asking questions about others and not so great, or willing, to understand themselves. Some believe that is a strength. I wonder, however, whether being ignorant about who one is and what one stands for is so great. This book is partly an attempt to start to understand that phenomenon of emotional disengagement and coolness and how it applies to China, and to see what, if anything, should or can be done about it.

The British certainly have complex and sometimes divided views. Between 2015 and 2016, there were two great diplomatic events for Britain. The second, which everyone knows about, revealed the complexity of these views, and has been exhaustively discussed and attended to – the surprising vote on 23 June 2016 to leave the EU. The other, however, had a much lower profile – the announcement during Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to the UK in late 2015 of a new golden age in Chinese–British relations. The referendum result has consumed months of interest and controversy, while the first preceded it with barely a ripple of press attention. Most will argue, of course, that the June 2016 referendum is a domestic development worthy of so much attention because it fundamentally changes Britain as a country and where it is heading. My argument in this book is that, important as leaving the EU is, it will be the way Britain shapes and crafts its relationship with China that will have the larger long-term impact, simply because unlike the EU, China is fundamentally changing the world in which we live far beyond the confines of Europe.

One reason why an audience in the UK can listen, with what seems on the surface like untroubled equanimity, to the story of another nation’s rise to global prominence and scenarios of its likely profound impact on their lives through its difference in values and world outlook is because, at least at the moment, China is still seen as remote. It does not figure in the daily lives of people – either through the role Chinese companies play in their economic life (as statistics in the Appendix show, China is a modest investor in the UK, and accounts for only a fraction of British overseas trade) or through the visibility of Chinese culture and politics in our media. This is compounded by the fact that the 2016 referendum showed that the British mindset is also still caught in the transition between being a major global player, and one working within a much more complex set of alliances and involvements. The commercial success of Chinese brands like telecommunications giant Huawei, and the questions this raises about state involvement back home in their success, might pose questions about the portending general collapse of western values and the annexation of commercial and public space in Australia or the United States. But despite their extensive involvement in the UK these brands only figure on the periphery of British lives and consciousness. Chinese investments that do exist here are, so far at least, largely embedded, and low profile (how many know that when they eat in Pizza Express, or drive a Volvo car that they are using the products of Chinese owned entities?). Chinese language and culture, while becoming more popular (look at the huge Lunar New Year celebrations held in London and elsewhere in the UK each year) are still of minority interest. There is one British Member of Parliament, Alan Mak – the first ever of Chinese ethnicity – elected in May 2015 for the Conservative Party. The majority of British people would likely be hard pressed to name the current president of the People’s Republic, Xi Jinping. They might not even know of Deng Xiaoping, the so-called (in China at least) architect of the post-1978 Reform and Opening Up Process, the means by which China has managed to attain the status that it has today. A Chinese-language film would be doing well to have distribution through art house networks in the UK, let alone get into mainstream theatres. The closest a film ever got to this in the UK was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – although Lee is American Taiwanese. Even something as palatable as Crazy Rich Asians by Singaporean Kevin Kwok, released in late 2018, struggles to get broad public attention when going up against the most desultory and critically panned American blockbuster of the moment.

All of this is reinforced by the paucity of survey data on British attitudes towards China. It is true that Pew Research Centre, the international public opinion research company, does include the UK in their annual audit of attitudes of countries to each other. But these are highly generic, and spread across the world. They simply do not, and cannot, go into great detail.² There is also Eurobarometer surveys which look at public opinion across the EU, where the UK currently figures, but again with a lack of specific focus and granularity.³ The simple fact is that at the moment, there is no high-profile annual survey along the lines produced by the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, on local views towards China, including issues like trust, levels of military threat, positive or negative impact of investment, etc.⁴ The same can be said for the United States, where it seems there is much more knowledge on local public opinion towards China, and in which ways it is negative and positive (or hard to interpret). The situation at the moment is that British views, in any detail, on China, are unknown, although the British Council has started to do more work in this space. Is this because no one believes these attitudes are worth investigating in sufficient depth to produce annual reports or surveys, and if so why? This way in which the British are, in essence, a mystery to themselves on this crucial issue will recur throughout this book. The core question is whether British people don’t know what they think about China, or don’t even want to know – two very different propositions.

China’s intrinsic marginality is nothing new. It is a space that China has occupied in our collective imagination for a long time. Why else use the descriptor Far East about a set of places with China at the centre which focuses on their remoteness and distance. In the past, because of Hong Kong and its associated territories which Britain counted as one of its colonies from 1841 to 1997, however, there was always a point of tangible contact. A cadre of British diplomats had a reason to know something about China. Universities like Cambridge and Oxford, King’s College London, SOAS and Durham in the nineteenth century, joined by others like Leeds in the twentieth, had a niche market in scholarship on Chinese matters. But these never grew to be very big. It is a notorious statistic in the China-engaged community in the UK – but one worth dwelling on because it is so rich in meaning and symbolizes this state of static complacency – that in 1999 there were 300 graduates in Chinese language from British universities; in 2015, long after China had overtaken the UK to become the world’s second largest economy, largest exporter, second largest importer, chief trading partner to over 120 countries, holder of the world’s largest foreign currency reserves, and producer of the world’s largest cohort of international students and tourists, that figure had remained at just 300 graduates. China had changed so much in that time and so had the UK, but this statistic suggests that the UK’s priorities and its attitude towards China and its growing importance had not progressed